05-Sep-13

Four Telling The Defense
Your Washington Post op/ed page outdid itself this past Sunday, cementing its role as the home for thoughtful conservative refutations of arguments never seen in the Post.

This week four clowns identified as “Ronald Reagan historians” went on at great length, trying to refute accusations of Reagan’s racism found in contemporary cinema classic “The Butler.”

The Charge: Reagan’s enthusiasm for South Africa’s aparthied regime reflected something other than fear Castro’s armies would reach the Cape of Good Hope. Here’s where the Right’s frenzied creation of “facts” on the ground and in their own minds really earn the honoraria. The Right’s dense layers of hackery, resident scholarship and dead horse beating pay off in the form of robot armies available for instant mobilization.

Your Voices of Outrage:

Steven F. Hayward

From his climate denialist American Enterprise institute day job, Hayward sallies forth to write Reagan books and muse in the pages of the Weekly Standard about all things climate and Churchillian. Churchill is the giveaway: Imperial Nostalgia is self explaining.

A fully paid up member of the vast right-wing conspiracy, Shirley has taken to cranking out Reagan bios when not busy with his pr firm Shirley & Banister. The outfit has repped most right obsessions at some point in their birthing, including fanciful versions of Bill Clinton, John Kerry, and Barack Obama’s biographies, as well as premier Nixon apologist and renaissance man Ben Stein. The Clinton book was authored by former FBI agent and serialfantisist Gary Aldrich, currently “President & Founder” of the Patrick Henry Center for Individual Liberty. Shirley serves on the advisory board, with the Board itself chaired by disgraced yet strangely buoyant Reagan henchman Ed Meese.

Kiron K. Skinner

Skinner’s career has been dedicated pummeling the reading public with endless Reagan mix tapes, repackaging the man’s every scribble for posterity. But prolonged exposure to Reagan’s Own Hand, Path, Stories, and Voice tends to reinforce the negative images she hoped to overturn.

An inevitable point in Skinner’s Reagan excuse making comes when she coquettishly informs us that ” I happen to be black,” ergo Reagan cannot be racist. A less intimate version of the Jack “he showered with them” Kemp clowning.

28-Jul-12

Disappointing Office Seeker

Barack Obama’s banishment of a Churchill bust from the Oval Office was a signature moment in his presidency, the disrespecting of our special relationship with Britain and source of endless mock conservative head-scratching, who wondered why anyone might be cool towards the beloved Winnie.

Rather then own up to their imperial blusterer banishment, the Obama White House tried to be cute, and got caught. Two Churchill busts by the same sculpture have had a spot in the White House, one remains, and the Bush related one lives at the British embassy.

So Obama hadn’t taken a stand against imperialism, delivered a rebuke to Tony Blair’s Bush Poodle-ism, or spared the nation from Churchillian blowhard-ism.

28-Aug-11

Who’s Crying Now?

From his controversial campaign embrace of Reagan nostalgia onward, Barack Obama has set Fantasy Reagan as the standard to be measured against. But he’s lacked the twinkling whimsy to pull off the big whoppers Reagan could do with half a brain, and the shamelessness of his handlers in putting them across.

But now, light from the East.

Obama was already three up on the Gipper in the coveted killing Qaddafi relatives category, hitting a son and three grandchildren. Reagan had to make to do with his sole Qaddafi hit, the adopted daughter killed when the US bombed Libya in 1986.

Now the rebel conquest of Tripoli threatens even that Reagan accomplishment. The Irish Times reports from the wreckage that Hana Qaddafi may have never died, and had gone on to a career as a doctor.

The Reagan bomb run was storied in legend and song, featuring daring-do, plucky Maggie Thatcher as Churchill in drag, and the perfidious French.

21-Feb-10

Grant Me This

It was a gathering of the conservative faithful at CPAC this past weekend, and the search for novel political analogies reached strange new heights.

Among the oddities was Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, whose doomed Presidential campaign took its first tentative steps off the cliff by reminding the assembled Neo-Confederates of a past glorius Republican office holder, U.S. Grant.

Somehow today’s conservative struggle resembles Grant’s grinding Civil War victories over the South, his scandel infested administration, or his occasional lunges towards protecting blacks and Republicans from the Klan in the South. Which is unclear, but Pawlenty has his own upbeat, crackpot version:

Pence also entertained the crowd with a musty Ronald Reagan yarn, one where Reagan encountered a magic pipe-fitter. This proto Joe The Plumber begged Reagan to save tax cuts for the rich, so guys like him could be hired by them. Pence has trotted out the tale of this wondrous encounter at least twice going back to 2005.

CPAC turned to Glen Beck for insane historical tales with a grain of truth.

Peeing all over John McCain’s myth of a muscular progressive Republican past, Beck rightly called Teddy Roosevelt an interventionist.